DNS issue

Hello. I'll apoligize up front that I'm not a network admin - I know just enough to be dangerous. My IT department has officially given up on solving my issue, though, so I thought I'd look for some suggestions here.

Yesterday, I got a new hard drive for my machine. All I've done so far is install Windows, along with SP2 and all of the available updates, and Office. I've joined the domain and am able to access all internal and external sites that I've tried so far except one - our Exchange server. The internal IP address and server name are set up in my hosts file. When I try to ping the server by the server name, though, it tries to ping an external IP address and fails. I am able to ping the internal IP successfully. When I go into the mail setup and try to do a name search, and I enter the server name, it fails. If I enter the internal IP address, it's able to find my ID on the server and replaces the IP address with the server name, but it won't go any further than that.

I've checked other machines in the office that are set up in the same way mine is (DHCP), and they work properly. I compared the output of ipconfig/all, and everything matches.

Any help would be appreciated. Please let me know if there's additional information that would be helpful.

Thanks for the reply, mlakrid. I'm not sure just what you're saying, though. The problem that I'm having is that, for some reason, my machine is relating the server name (npopower) to the external IP address. Other machines here in the office (all of them) use the same DNS servers, but, for some reason, I'm not getting sent to the right address.

This is a renaming of my previous thread from earlier today. The specific problem that I'm having is that Windows simply isn't seeing the hosts file. It's in the correct location - c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. For some reason, though, it's being ignored. I checked the environment variables to see if the location was there, but it isn't. Is there a way to tell Windows where to find the Hosts file? Is there a way to turn the use of the Hosts file on and off?

Windows XP SP2, and perhaps other versions, appears to ignore the hosts file if the "DNS Client" service is running. One workaround is to stop the DNS Client service using the Administrative Tools/Services icon in the Windows Control Panel. To preserve this setting across reboots ensure that the service is reconfigured to start manually. It is not known whether there are better ways to workaround this quirk.
This quirk has been confirmed to apply to XP Pro x64 (v2003) SP1.
This quirk has been confirmed not to apply to Windows Vista.

Click to expand...

Also,

The hosts file is generally named "hosts" and is located in the following directories for each operating system:

* Linux and other Unix-like operating systems: /etc
* Windows 95/98/Me: %windir%\
* Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ is the default location, which may be changed. The actual directory is determined by the Registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DataBasePath